A Rogues’ Gallery
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Ivan Aivazovsky Palace rains in Venice by moonlight 1878 Me, personally, I can’t get rid of the notion that all the stablecoins and shit
[See the full post at: A Rogues’ Gallery]Here’s a bit more:
FTX story is wild.
Here's what I found out so far.
🧵👇
— Genevieve Roch-Decter, CFA (@GRDecter) November 12, 2022
And all of this was rumor I needed to confirm. But how to confirm it? Who would you trust or believe?
It just was timely for the effect it’s likely to have. So in that way, didn’t matter if it was true or not, the warning should go out, and the indicators to look for.
I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I’m Disabused
November 10, 2022It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective.
I used to be disgusted, now I’m disabused: beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as serious analysis, these are the core dynamics I see:
Twitter thread: $40B to the DNC midterms. WHILE he was going bankrupt.
Poof! The user’s accounts weren’t just tied up because the exchange has halted, somehow, coincidentally, at the exact same time, some completely unknown, unexpected, outside “hackers” ALSO got in and stole all the money! Yessss! Now with two gangs of criminals on site, we don’t even know which one stole the bags! (Spoiler: it was Bank Man.)
Bank man playing video games during board meetings. Sure, why not? He wasn’t running the company anyway. He didn’t set it up, didn’t code it, didn’t authorize it, doesn’t fund it, didn’t run it. His whole purpose was as Actor. PR fall guy. So why not play video games, it’s all their parents could get out of them; the same parents that set the whole thing up.
Speaking of, suppose ol’ Bank Man goes to jail. Like Theranos serves 18 months (!) for a multi-billion dollar crime. (She requests to serve this impossible, un-credibly light sentence AT HOME as well, in her mansion). So Bank Man serves 18 months for $1B paycheck?
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. I will do this all day! I would serve 18 months for one TENTH the paycheck. What’s a credible American wage? $50k? So HALF a million is 10 YEARS wage. One million is TWENTY year’s wage. That is, like the police, retire young and early. So what’s $100 Million? 200 YEARS WAGES.
That is one TENTH of what Bank Man might have squirreled away, legally or illegally. ” FTX purchased $300MM in real estate including in the “playground of the rich” Albany, Bahamas”
Continuing Bank Man’s parents, insider and anti-cash people, that his girlfriend is the daughter of Gensler’s (former) boss. Ellison.
Posting more of that Twitter:
“Mr. Whale 🐳 whalechart.org
🔸April 25, 2019: Biden announces his presidential campaign.
🔸 13 days later, Sam Bankman-Fried, son of Barbara Fried (co-founder of political fundraising organizations), launches #FTX crypto exchange.
🔸 The exchange is an overnight success. SBF becomes biggest donor to Biden.”CoinDesk: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/bankman-frieds-cabal-of-roommates-in-the-bahamas-ran-his-crypto-empire-and-dated-other-employees-have-lots-of-questions/
“The whole operation was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas,” “…who were dating.”“SBF and CEO of Alameda lived together with 8 other people, all high on meth and all “involved romantically” with each other.” –Internet
Probably a bit exaggerated. But not much. Did you see Alameda’s CEO? I wouldn’t trust her with a coffee shop: “CEO of Alameda Research is a 28-year-old Harry Potter Fan”
Yeah, ultra-high-power billionaires always give hundred millions to college kids and their girlfriends without investigating anything. That’s how they stay rich!
” The money he spent bailing out other entities always seemed more of a cover up than bailout”
Uh-huh. Still unfolking. Or should I say, unraveling.
Red said
I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I’m Disabused
I like this word “disabuse”, I like the fact that this word implies abuse, that believing lies or falsehoods means you are being abused … or that is how it came across to me: Abuse is the real meaning of lies.
From Mirrian-Webster:
We know the verb abuse as a word meaning “to misuse,” “to mistreat,” or “to revile.” But when disabuse first appeared in the early 17th century, there was a sense of abuse, now obsolete, that meant “to deceive.” Sir Francis Bacon used that sense, for example, when he wrote in 1605, “You are much abused if you think your virtue can withstand the King’s power.” The prefix dis- has the sense of undoing the effect of a verb, so it’s not surprising that disabuse means “to undeceive.” English speakers didn’t come up with the idea of joining dis- to abuse all on their own, however. It was the French who first appended their prefix dés- to their verb abuser. English disabuse is modeled after French désabuser.
Why are we surprised that the billionaires are stealing? How do you think they got their money in the first place, honest hard work? They are crooks and now they are getting brazen about what they do, knowing that they will never be called to account. I do my own investing, I do not do corporate or government pensions or any funds, even self-investing without the tax break will make you more than the clowns on the pension funds who perform so radically badly. Finance is like gym membership, you contribute to a pension for decades without really checking the performance, then you retire and have nothing. You pay the gym for decades, you never go, you retire and end up with nothing.
SBF literally just hacked the remaining assets at FTX. Guarantee it’s him. He’s done this before (see my previous tweet).
The fact he has not been arrested already shows negligence of @DOJPH & @SECGov. Do your FREAKING job.
— Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) November 12, 2022
JUST IN: SBF had a “backdoor” built into FTX’s accounting system, allowing him to alter the company’s financials without alerting executives and auditors – Reuters
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) November 12, 2022
Here’s a brief summary of Dr. D’s special strain of stream of consciousness today:
“Buy Monero……………………becoz if the reverse took place, FTX prematurely-Fried Bank-JewishMan took down Binance Math Savant ChinaGuy Changpeng Zhao, then we’d be crowing about victory over China.”
…but it didn’t. So we won’t.
Interesting Mr. Dr. D, you make no mention of WannaMine, WannaCry, EternalBlue, NSA
Anglin posted it
Here's the 30 second summary of the FTX drama that is blowing up in crypto.
1/ How FTX (a multi billion dollar co) almost died overnight
2/ And why this is a god tier strategic move by @cz_binance
— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) November 8, 2022
TAE can find stories …..
One of the biggest, FTX, just went from $32 billion to $0 in a single day. Not even Enron could beat that.Dr. D., yes him again, ties together an interesting history behind it. Which in turn ties into the DNC too. And Dr. D. doesn’t even mention yet that just this morning, FDX claimed they were hacked: “FTX Possibly Hacked, $895m Drained From Customer Wallets.” Should I believe that? How do you drain $895m out of $0?
Someone found a way to get “blood out of a stone”
——–Re. previous Dr. D’s post hiked to top, on Nov. 11, about conflict in Ukr.
Dr. D reminds us that the line of contact (Russian forces vs. Ukr. forces) is extraordinarily long. Much of the countryside on and around it is mostly open land, some forest, some villages, etc.
Victories and losses along it are no doubt fluid and possibly even difficult to describe exactly; what is reported is more a constructed narrative aimed at various parties, such as “We won a battle” Triumph story from Ukr-USuk, and “We retreat to save lives” (as Dr. D points out), from Russia which may hold some truth, but the nitty-gritty is that the position in Kherson was – is – untenable, and throwing more ressources at it, for what? would have been useless, migsuided.
At heart, as well, R. is not interested in conquering territory (it has plenty of it now, too low population, etc.) but only in guaranteeing its security and ‘defending, protecting ethnic Russians’ (this can’t be given up) and showing it has the ‘upper hand’ in a certain ‘smart’ way, while challenging and opposing the US and its confused thrashing about vassals.
How Ukr. will be partioned will be decided in the Corridors of Power, and will not be specifically related to ‘victories’ / ‘losses’ along *that* line of contact.
A last point: Imho Russia will not accept the Ukr-USuk-NATO vs. Russia conflict to become a frozen one, with endless fighting, loss of life, etc. (See Syria.) They will go all out to put an end to it, settle on some resolution, victory or defeat (depending on how one views that, and what the spin is.)
All IMHO, just one view at the present moment.
I thought that D’s article will confirm stupidity of any “crypto” in our energy starving world with possible power and data outages that, most likely, will become common. His conclusion, I gather, is that FTX saga is the ploy to kill any crypto-concept in our heads, which is, presumably, financial decoupling (aka rebellion) from the current banking.
Amazes me to read of “preping concepts” that levitate between or include both, wood burning stove and hi-tech block chain energy guzzling monstrosity.
Bit coin in early days was mined for a fraction of “current value”, that is (I do not bother to know exact #) in thousands of $.
Who is supposed to toil to make up for the the difference in value between purchase and sale that one can collect and walk away with victory dance?More Tweets, not too far off:
“Swapnil Devre |
You are wrong, CZ [Binance] tweet didn’t collapse FTX1.FTX prints FTT out of thin air
2.FTX lends FTT to Alameda Research
3.Alameda Research borrows USD stables against FTT
4.Alameda Research sends USD stables to FTX
5.Repeat = infinite money” (P.S. only if they have connections with regulators to have a U.S. Bank front-door access)What’s with Crytpo? Um, it’s complicated. Who pays $60k for a coin mined at $5? Same people who buy a gold nugget I find in a California river. My cost = $0. Same people who buy my Amazon stock from 1999. Cost = $10. Or a Banksy. Cost = Free. It’s what YOU think it’s worth. Nothing else matters.
Why would you buy a stove and crypto? Why do you own a wood stove and a 2018 car? The car can’t be fixed if the internet goes down either. In fact, the parts for your 1969 Camaro won’t show up in the parts store. You won’t be able to make phone calls, even with a land line. So you need BTC if/when you need to commerce not face-to-face, which has become extremely common.
Again, why are cryptos worth anything? Because although FTX may be broke, Credit Suisse is as well, We hear BlackRock has filed, and Citi may be as well, and DeutscheBank certainly is. Cryptos have value only as much as Banks are crooked and failing. Without bank crimes and fraud, crypto would have no value.
…That’s why you can be certain they will have near-infinite value.
Well, what can I say, you are well adjusted in this environment, aka functioning “Moral man in the immoral world”.
So, what is the bitching and complaining about, in your daily posts?I have worked as a systems engineer, systems architect and in technical leadership roles in IT (financial services for 15 years and higher ed for 10 years). Crypto always seemed like the pet rock to me. I mean, I got it but didn’t get it at all. Guess I’m too stupid to get rich, but I can sleep at night.
But wait. What about this engineered (contrived) failure of cryptos as a setup for Central Bank digital “currencies”? Wipe out all the current ones (well-deserved, for the most part) and then induce/con the gullible dupes that still trust the government (and its central-bank owners) into accepting the “official” one.
Financial contributions – FTX Sam Bankman-Fried second only to George Soros in Democratic donations… pic.twitter.com/CImZk0oUvJ
— .. (@Xx17965797N) November 12, 2022
“…That’s why you can be certain they will have near-infinite value.”
I’ll be sure and have a bitcoin and a pocket knife with me, when this whole dog and pony show hits the skids. Then, when I’m out in Del Rio or someplace, I can wonder into a roadhouse and scrape some flakes off the bitcoin with my knife to buy an ice cold analogue bottle of Corona.
I see virtual absurdity!
And here’s Karl Denninger on cryptos (and also note the comments):
It is said that during the tulip mania of 1637-42, a particularly desirable tulip had a value equivalent to the finest house in Amsterdam. And then it didn’t.
It is said that even Isaac Newton (supposedly the greatest mind of the times) got caught up in the Great South Seas investment scam and lost a huge sum.
Whereas such scams were the exception in the past, they are now the norm in NATOstan nations. What isn’t scam is Ponzi. And much of it is casino.
And people wonder why trust is broken.
“The West is not agreement capable.” -Putin
“There be opportunity for such huge profits that I cannot reveal the details. But you will have to act quickly my friend and give me your money today.”
At least FOMO is largely dead. Especially for housing and share markets.
Without energy, nothing happens.
I wonder what portion of the energy supply in NATOstan nations is now devoted to running scams like ‘carbon trading’, ‘weapons for Ukraine’, ‘security forces’, ‘safe-and-effective vaccines’, constructing ‘green energy’ projects, ‘pension funds’ etc. 10%?, 20%? 30%?.
The plight of mirgrant workers in Qatar, by France 24, in Eng (some subs.)
General, not specifically about how the stadium for the World Cup, was built, etc.
A nod to Elvis C: I also try to be amused.
(I have always wondered what it is about “red shoes”.)
I guess it’s the end of FTX advertising in my fortune cookies.This will keep pouring in, but you know US Taxpayer money, to Ukraine, laundered back to Congress? Said all year, or every year since Barisma? Yeah, well news is now, FTX had a direct line to Ukraine. So, can’t really launder ANOTHER ten billion in the banking system? Without trace, to whoever? No problem! We just created an Alt-Bank system! Overnight, a ten-billionaire exists!
…Imagine what we’d say if, say, East Podunk bank, owned by … Joe Biden’s, Nancy Pelosi’s, is there anyone left? … AOC’s half-sister, suddenly became larger than JP Morgan Chase, and ran all the GOP election financing, being the largest donor to Don Trump, Jr.
…And then imagine Parlor, NASCAR, MyPillow, and the NRA all invested heavily in it. Alarm bells yet?
N O P E. The “Crypto” investors jumped in with both feet. …Except they weren’t. The Ontario Teacher’s Union doesn’t bank their gol-durned money with college students in the Bahamas. Somebody TOLD them to do it. As a tip, or as a direct order, don’t care.
Now, Step II: AFTER funding the DNC midterms, for which donations had PLUMMETED, if/when this all goes down, Gary Gensler of the SEC — whose kids and connections did all this — is going to say “Hark and Lo! I told you so! We need regulation, because PhD Teachers are too retarded to not hand their money to meth-smoking college students! I got your back! I just so happens I have a 10,000 page bill already written with 500 copies in my warehouse. It outlaws that mean old Bitcoin, and gives sweeping worldwide jurisdiction of all exchanges in the solar system.”
The Teacher’s union goes on TV and says, “Yes! We are the biggest idiots planet earth has seen in generations! Give your kids to us! Please help by passing Gary’s pre-planned, pre-positioned, pre-printed anti-crypto law, and replace it with something safe: THE SYSTEM WE ALREADY HAVE.” (Central Bank Digital Money. With no physical media and no accounting.)
CNN and the people cheer! Help us Daddy! When has the SEC and Congress ever overlooked crimes and decades long banking schemes with over-leverage except all 100 years before 2008, and every year since then? S&L, Subprime, Madoff…
See where this is going? Aaaand no one’s going to buy it, because trust is broken. In government and Banks. But they sure can make a mess in the meanwhile!
I can be moral — maybe. But I have to cooperate in an immoral world that sets the rules and sends the Sheriff down at me if I 1) Say anything. 2) Do anything. 3) Stop anything 4) Alarm anyone or more importantly 5) Take just and long-lasting, much-deserved revenge on the people who richly deserve it, largely, but not limited to, scamsters, fraudsters, and paid extortionists. But they let loose a lot of murders every day too. So many that we have 6-sigma death rate. The police won’t take revenge on those people, accurately, in a court of law. Take revenge on even those people yourself and they get all kinds of mad. Just like they don’t want men in high-crime areas to be well-armed. So, aren’t they more accurately #AntiLaw Officers? That’s why the sarcasm.
Non-addressing-but-addressing (kind gay) mode of communication is “interesting”, but there you have it.
“I can be moral — maybe.”
That’s a good one, given that your daily rants are nothing but a moral posturing.
Make a pick.All the “crypto” currencies and their corresponding wallets were based on a false premise (that was known to be false when all this e-commerce nonsense started. It is all based on the assumption that the product of large primes is “hard” to factor (or mathematical problems isomorphic to that one). Well, hard for Joe Schmo is one thing, hard for the NSA and other governments “three letter” agencies is another.
Since then, numerous mathematical journal papers have appeared (and many censored) showing, e.g. explaining algorithms that can do fast factoring (or “problems isomorphic to that”). In any event, there is no mathematical proof showing the large prime factoring problem is intrinsically hard.
Further, the public/private key encryption methods, are NO HARDER than the product of large primes factoring problem. In the vast majority of cases they are, in fact, much easier. For any public/private key encryption the public is likely to be exposed to one does not actually have to solve for the actual “private key” given a known “public key”. One only has to find ANY “private key” that gives rise to the SAME public key. At that point it doesn’t make any difference, one gains all the access of the “genuine” “private key” holder. For the vast majority of public keys there are a great many “private keys” that will give rise to them, hence the probability of finding one is relatively high and a much easier problem to solve than the factoring one, which is not as “hard” as most people think.
This stuff, back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s was normally in University Graduate Level Mathematics courses in “Abstract Algebra” and “Number Theory”. It also was frequently covered in Graduate Engineering courses in “Signal Analysis and Communications Systems”.
Digital currencies, wallets, etc. were all a fraud from the get go. Modern cheap powerful computers now allow any mathematically knowledgeable organization or even just a single person to “print” as much of it as they like.
Dr D said
I can be moral — maybe. But I have to cooperate in an immoral world that sets the rules and sends the Sheriff down at me if …
But I can vote out the sheriff, so no problem. You were advocating for voting the other day, so who are we voting for, the people like Soros who run the DNC or those that ran FTX? We have a choice of DNC or GOP, both as evil as each other. We just experienced the election, midterm through the worst performing admin – an admin actively and deliberately destroying the standard of living – after the worst managed pandemic of all time, yet the election reflects none of this? Sure, go vote, it will make changes to your life. Times will only change when people realise their power is not in voting, it is in violence.
Kassandra #120847
Crypto always seemed like the pet rock to me. I mean, I got it but didn’t get it at all. Guess I’m too stupid to get rich, but I can sleep at night.
Sums up my feelings pretty well…I never bought the hype…cheers
Thanks!
circa early 2018:
Still, the question which caused William Luther PhD (Econ/Math?) to stumble on the podium at Saint Vincent’s College Latrobe during one of his stops on the FedGov’t sponsored ‘sell-crypto-to-the-educated-public-tour’ was:“Did the Federal Government of the United States through the release of NSA-authored, EternalBlue exploits WannaMine & WannaCry select a de facto cryptocurrency standard?”
My follow up question was: “I think Monero is it. Tell me, am i wrong?”
Of course, William knew that I couldn’t know but the NSA sure as hell knew at least one of those EternalBlue exploits used Monero to do its thing.
We can agree I wasn’t privy to the machinations of SBU*Ukraine*, ShadowBrokers, Crowstrike, or NSA’s The Equation Group.Were or are you privy, RAM?
References, superficial:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group““WannaMine” was born. WannaMine is a mineware malware variant created for the sole purpose of installing and running Monero software on a victim’s system and using its processing power to mine Monero for the adversary”
GET THE FACTS
https://vk.com/@739151204-smo-securing-ukrainianus-biological-and-nuclear-siteshttps://vk.com/@739151204-smo-securing-ukrainianus-biological-and-nuclear-sites
SMO – securing Ukrainian/US biological and nuclear sites.
From the March 31 Russian MoD briefingMain ones were around Kiev and these were the ones MoD wanted to get into/shut down. Scroll down a bit and you will see the map.
MORE INFO
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine
On April 11, 2020, President Zelenskyy visited the SED unit in Pokrovskoye City, Donetsk Oblast, and familiarized himself with the capabilities of the mobile laboratories to help military and civilian people during the COVID-19 epidemic.All the “crypto” currencies and their corresponding wallets were based on a false premise … that the product of large primes is “hard” to factor
This is true for the wallets but not for bitcoin mining itself. Bitcoin mining is based on finding a hash for a block of data that has a certain number of leading zeroes. This can only be done by lots of trial and error. In 2018 it took around 3 quadrillion hash attempt to find an acceptable hash for each block and it has gone up from there.
I sometimes read a prepper blog. People often ask what other preppers think about gold and the opinion is almost always that it has no intrinsic value (you can’t eat it) and that it should be avoided. Gold’s allure is that it is rare and pretty. An ounce of gold takes about 3 tons of ore plus a lot of energy to create and in some sense that’s what gold is, condensed environmental damage and energy.
Bitcoin is similar in that it has no intrinsic value (you can’t eat it) but some people find it pretty (or rather, elegant) and it too is more or less condensed environmental damage and energy.
The problem that bitcoin and the block chain purportedly solves is that it is tamper proof. You could theoretically change something in the blockchain ledger from a year ago and recalculate all the hashes since then but this is impossible in practice because of the number of calculations necessary.
A thought experiment: Try to devise a ledger that is tamper proof. For instance you could carve the ledger into the Rock of Gibraltar and have a camera on it at all time so that no once could modify it. One can of course think of several ways this could be hacked. If you could come up with a way to create an unhackable ledger the world would beat a path to your door and you’d be a billionaire. Bitcoin may fail but it is probably the closest thing we have seen to a tamper proof ledger.
Wallets on the other hand are hackable.People were warning against this long ago:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000523101519/http://www.hydrophones.com/Insecure.html
“This can only be done by lots of trial and error.”
Wrong
And physical gold is an essential element of modern electronics. You are no doubt reading this on an electronic device that uses GOLD wires to connect the semiconductor chips to the circuits.
Were or are you privy, RAM?
Once again….William knew that I couldn’t know but the NSA sure as hell knew at least one of those EternalBlue exploits used Monero to do its thing.
We can agree I wasn’t privy to the machinations of SBU*Ukraine*, ShadowBrokers, Crowstrike, or NSA’s The Equation Group.@ram
Rainbow table have to do with encryption. Bitcoin mining is not the same as encryption. It’s a completely different process. I suspect you don’t actually understand how bitcoin mining works.
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